Governance

To speak of governance is to employ a metaphor. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates describe elaborately the metaphor of the captain on the ship so as to illustrate for Adeimantus why the philosopher should be king rather than submitting to the vicissitudes of an unruly demos. The true master of governance of what even today we call the ship of state might be dismissed as a stargazer by those simply seeking to take control. But, says Socrates, in their ambition they would fail to understand that paying attention to all the signs of things around them—the seasons, the sky, the winds, and stars—is actually what is needed to guide the common endeavour successfully. And so it was that the idea of an art of steering—the French word gouvernail preserves something of the Greek κυβερνάω (kubernáo)—became so closely associated with the task of politics. The brilliant rhetorical effect of Socrates’ metaphor resides in the sense that the ship can run aground or be lost to the storm if there is not a firm, wise hand on the tiller. The notion that the ship is built as a single container for the souls within it and is going toward one common destination predisposes us to imagine that governance involves the effort by or for a collectivity to set its direction and to steer toward it. It is striking, therefore, that the same metaphor has surfaced in contemporary thought, albeit pointing toward a very different predisposition. The notions of cybernetics, drawn from exactly the same term used by Plato to describe the art of steering well, and cyberspace—a space within which we are governed by computer networks —both suggest that there is a context in which we are steered rather than an entity that we steer. The term governance is now often deployed much more with that sense, suggesting that we must come to acknowledge and in some degree accept the way in which the organized whole, the system, functions to govern us. I want to propose a way of thinking about governance that is neither the effort to set a single direction for a collectivity nor the effort to discern the system that steers us. I am inspired in this by a short text of Michel Serres, Petite Poucette, which imagines the relationship and even posture undertaken toward our information technology devices—our tablets and mobile phones—as involving steering. All of us have tools now purporting to allow us to govern our own lives, albeit within the social networks where we decide what or whom to like. What would the world be if we were all steering but not aiming to control a single tiller so as to find a unique destination for the polity? And what if, unlike in Plato’s imagination, we all had access to all the signs and signals of the things around us—including all of the directions taken by others as they sail? Can there be such a thing as the collective intelligence of steering that is not the autopoiesis—self-creation—of the system that governs us but rather the result of all of our conscious efforts to steer? There has been a kind of rediscovery of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in some of the contemporary thinking around swarm intelligence. Complex swarms take on emergent properties when, for example, all of the efforts of individual termites to burrow after sources of sustenance produce mounds or “cathedrals” that can even provide thermoregulation for the colony. Some biologists, such as Kevin Kelly, go so far as to think of the swarm as itself constituting an …